Modern communication networks are composed of many nodes that are interconnected to facilitate communication and provide redundancy. These nodes may be interconnected via cables, twisted pair, shared media or similar transmission media. Each node may include, for example, communication devices, interfaces, and addresses. The topology that describes how the nodes of a communication network are interconnected can be complicated.
Modern networks include redundancy in the data link and routing layers. Even so, when a core device fails in the network it can cause different parts of the network to be disconnected from a network management station. It is the responsibility of the network management system poller and analyzer to find these faults and determine the root cause without burdening the operator with superfluous information about impacted devices. When there is a failure within the communication network, a network manager needs to accurately determine where the failure occurred and the severity of the failure in an efficient manner so that affected nodes are impacted for as little time as necessary. One approach to respond to a network failure is to process network events as they occur in a first-in first-out (FIFO) fashion. However, when the network has many nodes there may be numerous nodes impacted by single network failure. In this case a FIFO approach to failure analysis leads to a long mean time to locate and fix the failure.